Now We Shall Be Entirely Free: The Waterstones Scottish Book of the Year 2019

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Although Lacroix keeps mum while travelling, we have seen enough of his mind by this stage to know that he feels himself to be “at the edge of something” (breakdown, paranoia, confession), and understand that the appeal of a remote island has something to do with finding a physical place that matches his interior mood. None of this slows down the action, which is essentially a pursuit that starts as the military retreat to Corunna and ends in a manhunt among the Western Isles of Scotland.

However, he does not realise that he is under threat: in Spain he has been scapegoated by the British Army for an attack on a village owned by a senior Spanish politician. John has been brought home from Spain and the Peninsular War in a bad way, and is left with his housekeeper in rural Somerset. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian View image in fullscreen ‘Eyes open, heart open, feet on the ground’: Andrew Miller. I have never studied the Napoleonic wars, and especially the Spanish campaign and the peninsular wars.I still eye the Booker list, of course, but I am increasingly interested in the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, for one, which plays more predictably to my own preference for both good scene setting (yay, exposition! Now We Shall Be Entirely Free follows John Lacroix, a soldier trying to escape his guilt-ridden memories of atrocities carried out by British soldiers in Spain during the Napoleonic wars, as he makes his way to the Hebrides; it also follows, in parallel, the two men–one English, one Spanish–dispatched to find him and hold him accountable for what happened. With his lovely prose, Miller has refashioned a flight-pursuit trope into an historical novel or, perhaps more accurately, an historical fantasy set loosely in the the Napoleonic Wars. At least historical fiction doesn’t have the haircut problem that historical television invariably suffers from.

In this work, Lacroix’s hearing has been damaged by the war and Emily is going blind from cataracts. These are disturbing questions, yet the novel is no worthy, schematic churn through a series of ethical options, but a pacy thriller. The result, for each, is heightened vulnerability and a slight withdrawal from a world that can no longer be fully perceived.

In the storyline, a key (and very clever, and subtle part of the narrative) concerns the leading lady, Emily.

Now We Shall Be Entirely Free has many virtues--beautiful writing, interesting, quirky historical setting, a certain interest in narrative momentum—along with a killer vice, a rather light hand with historical verisimilitude, which ultimately problematizes the novel for me. when business was brisk,” and explains to his companion about “the creeler, the gaffer, the carding room. Why the final line of the book (the book’s title) has resonance not only for Lacroix, but for Emily too. The chaos of war and the period detail is quite impressive, and the whole thing is a very enjoyable read, but I am deducting a star because the plotting seems a little too neat and contrived. The only redeeming quality of the book is that it was relatively well-told - even though Miller was telling a story where for the most part (and I can’t stress this enough) NOTHING HAPPENS, he tells it in a way that keeps you turning the page.I have been lucky to have read several brilliant novels recently, and this one will stay with me for a long time. It is not hard to believe that atrocities against civilians happened, but whether they would have been processed the way that they are in this novel seems highly unlikely to me. He was afraid he would say it – that Emily would ask some perfectly innocent question and he would say it. Like most of his books, it’s set in the past — in the early 19th century, in this case, when John Lacroix, a British Army officer and veteran of the Peninsular War between England and France, is deposited, half-dead, at his estate in Somerset. I appreciated the inclusion of the Hebrides, but having holidayed on various of those stunning islands for many years, I couldn't understand the lack of detail and almost sparseness of the prose in those parts.